Mahashivaratri 2025.
Across India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and outposts of Shaivite influence – Bali, Vietnam, Mauritius, the Caribbean, and beyond – Mahashivaratri will be observed tonight in fervent devotion through silence, song, and sacred chants.
This annual revel is an ode to Shiva, the Supreme Yogi and Ascetic, Nataraja (King of Dance), Eternal Guru, and Transcendent Madman. He is Mahadeva, the Great God, who keeps company with mendicants, eccentrics, bums, and spectral wanderers – kindred spirits who haunt cremation grounds, where time dissolves into ash and the Lord sits absorbed in meditation, beyond space, beyond time, beyond thought.
No god in the Hindu pantheon commands the peculiar fascination that Shiva does. He is the distilled essence of paradox – at once the fierce ascetic and the divine householder, the annihilator and the supreme benefactor, the terrifying Rudra and the most tender of gods. He is stillness and tempest, void and abundance, the silence before creation and the force that unravels it. He is not merely worshipped; He is invoked in awe, in dread, in the hushed wonder of those who glimpse the infinite and recoil.
Shiva’s very form is a constellation of potent symbols:
- The crescent moon – time, arrested and worn like an ornament.
- The serpent coiled at His throat – fear subdued, death mastered.
- The ashes on His body – the final truth of existence, embraced.
- The Ganga flowing from His locks – wisdom, descending from the heavens to the mortal realm.
He is passion and detachment entwined, lost in the depths of meditation yet bound to His wife Parvati in a love both tender and tumultuous. He walks the cremation grounds, yet He is Ardhanarishvara, the Lord who is half woman, inseparable from Shakti.
But Shiva is not merely a god – He is a condition of being. To seek Him is to court dissolution, to strip away illusion. His is not the comfort of easy devotion but the event horizon of a black hole – beyond it, no return, only immersion in the infinite.
Wild and unfathomable, terrifying and merciful, Shiva is the great cosmic enigma. Forever compelling, forever beyond reach.
Shiva: Shadow and Silence – Borim, Goa
5DS, 24-70L f/2.8 II
Verse 6 of the Ardhanarisvarastotra in Sanskrit, attributed to Adi Shankara, ca. 7th c. CE.
अम्बोधरश्यामलकुन्तलायै तडित्प्रभाताम्रजटाधराय ।
निरीश्वरायै निखिलेश्वराय नमःशिवायै च नमःशिवाय ॥
Her tresses –
dark, like rain-bearing clouds;
His copper-colored locks –
glitter, like a streak of lightning.
She has no Lord while
He is the Lord of all!
Prostration to śivā and
Prostration to śiva.
Tevaram hymn 1.107.3, composed in Tamil by Tirugnanasambandhar, ca. 7th c. CE.
பாலன நீறுபுனை திகழ்மார்பிற
பல்வளைக்கை நல்ல
ஏல மலர்க்குழலா
ளொருபாக மமர்ந்தருளிக்
கோல மலர்ப்பொழில்சூழ் கொடிமாடச்
செங்குன்றூர் மல்கும்
நீலநன் மாமிடற்றான்
கழலேத்தல் நீதியே
He yields His chest –
smeared with ash as white as milk –
To Her –
Whose lovely hands are adorned by bracelets,
Whose dark hair is fragrant with fresh flowers.
In koṭimāṭacceṅkuṇṛūr 1
surrounded by ponds that brim with flowers,
is the benign blue-necked One!
It is verily our dharma to worship
His feet.
1. Lit. the town of the red hill where the housetops are shrouded by creepers. The town is known today as Tiruchengode.
